On Wednesday of last week, Governor Sununu reiterated his willingness to strip the modest ultrasound requirement from the Fetal Life Protection Act—New Hampshire’s only prohibition on late-term abortion.
As Cornerstone has repeatedly explained, removing this narrowly-tailored requirement would gut and nullify the law, allowing abortionists to execute unborn children at any point in pregnancy without consequence. The Governor understands perfectly well that an ultrasound repeal is not a way of modifying the law, but a deceptive attempt to quietly repeal it.
This is not just a pro-abortion vs. pro-life issue. Many pro-abortion Republicans, and even some Democratic voters, favor a late-term abortion ban.
Yet pro-abortion extremists in both parties have introduced bills to either explicitly repeal the Fetal Life Protection Act or, as the Governor has proposed, to gut the law and render it unenforceable. Any one of these bills would mean that a viable child who is—for example—35 weeks old could be killed without the abortion provider receiving so much as the equivalent of a parking ticket.
Yet both parties do not bear the same kind of responsibility for the threats faced by the Fetal Life Protection Act. Every elected branch of government in New Hampshire is led by Republicans—not by Democrats. Our six-month abortion ban is not in jeopardy because of Planned Parenthood: it is in jeopardy because of pro-abortion Republicans.
Governor Sununu’s unwillingness to stand by this moderate law is only one part of the problem. Republican leadership in the House have continued to give pro-abortion extremists within the GOP enormous influence as members of the House Judiciary Committee, despite the pro-life promises of our state Republican platform and the wishes of most Republican voters. That they have taken no action to remove or censure these representatives despite repeated requests to do so does not bode well for the new law, or indeed any attempt to protect the preborn in the state.
If a bill to return to abortion up to birth were to pass the House, whether by gutting the Fetal Life Protection Act or outright repealing it, voters need to hold Republican politicians accountable for their failure to uphold a basic principle of their own party platform: the dignity of human life. This repeal would not only be the single greatest legislative betrayal of the preborn in any Republican-led state in the Union, but would take us to a place from which we may never recover. Granite Staters should not tolerate this.
Contact your representatives and urge them to stand firmly by the FLPA—and to do everything they can to oppose repealing or gutting bills. For more on the FLPA, see our informational graphic and short video below.
